Hernandez on Codex Sinaiticus: Revelation = Commentary-text!

It appears that Codex Sinaiticus is so unique and unusual in its text of Revelation, that it ought to be classed as a kind of "commentary" and/or collection of readings and interpretations collected over centuries.

Juan Hernandez Jr. of Bethel University, St. Paul, MN, presented a paper titled “Codex Sinaiticus: The Earliest Greek Christian Commentary on John’s Apocalypse?”  In an abstract he states:

The Apocalypse in codex Sinaiticus is a striking example of a fourth-century text that differs substantially from modern critical editions. It exhibits dozens of differences at key points, reflecting the concerns, interests, and idiosyncrasies of its earliest copyists and readers. Taken as a whole, Sinaiticus’s text of Revelation may constitute one of our earliest Christian commentaries on the book, disclosing its fourth-century milieu and anticipating the later concerns of Oecumenius and Andrew of Caesarea. This is no commentary in the contemporary sense, however. Sinaiticus’s readings range from the spectacular to the mundane and include the theological, the liturgical, the commonplace and even the infelicitous. It is a text ever in tension with itself, effective both in its capacity to obscure as well as in its regulation of meaning. Clarity and confusion co-reign and compete for our attention. Despite that, we can discern a concerted effort to elucidate the Apocalypse’s message by scores of changes throughout. Some of these are inherited. Others created. All affected the reading of the text.

Notice originally Posted on Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 

by Peter Nathan Sepher, 

http://blog.vision.org/first-followers/ 

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mr.scrivener